About
v1.0 - 20.12.2012
This is a text transformation program that converts letters into various fancy equivalents of the Mighty Unicode.
I was too lazy to check if these exists for Umlaute (or ß or what have you), so only the 26 letters of the ANSI code page are supported.
Credit goes to whoever compiled these awesome lowercase and uppercase letter lists!
... In case you're wondering, I wrote this to allow for a bit more 𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑡𝑦 in Twitter or Tumblr posts. :3
v1.1 - 23.12.2012
Now with support for (some) digits! \o/
Also, capitals! Though those don't appear to be fully implemented in all browsers. :|
v1.2 - 24.12.2012
(╯^_^)╯︵ sdıʃɟǝʃqɐ⊥! Courtesy of fileformat.info! :D
v1.3 - 07.02.2013
u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲i̲n̲'̲ ̲:̲3̲
v1.4 - 18.09.2015
No changes to the code, but I added an FAQ. If you have any questions, hit me up at info.slothsoft@gmail.com!
v1.5 - 29.05.2016
Revamped the code, changed the available fonts. Underlining and flipping never really worked all that well anyway.
The mapping is now done based on an XML file.
v1.6 - 01.06.2016
Brought back underlined text! I had no idea how popular that was. ^^;
FAQ
Google Chrome can't display these Unicode characters, what's up with that?
This behavior has been described in detail by the peeps at gschoppe.com.
In short, there's a bug almost as old as Chrome itself and it makes Chrome mess up Unicode when you don't have a font installed that contains all those nifty Unicode symbols you want to display.
I did what gschoppe suggested and installed the Code200x fonts, and now Chrome can display these glyphs, tho they look a bit weird:
For comparison, Firefox (which apparently uses an internal fallback font):
Internet Explorer, incidentally, doesn't need any help to display Unicode either:
In conclusion, there's nothing you can do to make other people's Chrome see your Unicode messages, but you can at least fix your own Chrome.
What about umlauts or other diacritical funstuff, like öäü, êéè, őű?
These don't exist in the Unicode spec. Most of the glyphs that this tool can output are defined in Unicode code block U1D400, and the Unicode Standard hasn't bothered to include them yet. A glyph like ä simply can't be represented in Unicode.*
I suspect Unicode will eventually support non-English characters 𝔞𝔠𝔯𝔬𝔰𝔰 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝒻ℴ𝓃𝓉 𝕤𝕥𝕪𝕝𝕖𝕤, but as of now (version 8.0), we're out of luck.
* That's not entirely true. Using what's known as
combining
glyphs in Unicode, you can create all sorts of stuff:
ᴀ̀𝐚́𝑎̂𝒂̃𝖺͆𝗮̅𝒶̆𝓪̇𝔞̈𝕒̉
ß̀ß́ß̂ß̃ß͆ß̅ß̆ß̇ß̈ß̉
...but that's much less trivial to implement than a simple 1-on-1 lookup, so this tool can't do that.